Issue #28 - Some decisions aren't yours to make

“The time is always right to do the right thing.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’m asked to make decisions every day - you probably do too. Decisions really pave the way for allowing success or failure to flourish. I make decisions for users, but know that they are susceptible to change once we know more about them. That’s what iteration is about after all.

Some decisions are already made - this is true, but a decision is made at a moment in time - it HAS to be reviewed and changed over time.

Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same thing. Never stop learning by executing your best guess.

Note: I’m reaching my 30th issue. Would love to hear what you love or hate about these issues so I’m always making the right decisions for you!

Focusing on causality, anxieties, and motivations of users is called Jobs To Be Done. Job Stories can help you apply this when you design features. Intercom, makers of the awesome website chat client share the knowledge. Great takeaway: With job stories you can start to understand why a feature failed. Hard to do with user stories alone. Tip: You should use a live chat function like Intercom on your online store - you’ll learn a tonne about your users!

One of my students who is on the UX design course at CareerFoundry would love this! Here we have a curated list of resources to help you on your journey into the User Experience of Virtual Reality. From the signals, I think we’ve got a few years to read up and experiment before it hits the big time - exciting!

“If you work in product development you hear a lot about user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). When people don’t really know what they are talking about, they use these terms interchangeably.” Jargon is pretty prolific in digital design and I constantly audit myself to make sure that I’m not using it. Let’s just design great products right.

Treat UX like a puzzle. Solve it every time. That’s the message from Joel Marsh. If we’re not solving something, what are we trying to accomplish? I find that the boundaries between design and business blur when we talk about designing for user needs. For UX to work in real life, everyone needs to be working together. This is more prolific in startups than in established players in my view, where change is difficult.

Users have “other things to do.” Yep, they most likely want to get what they want and leave, so don’t worry too much about time on site metrics. Also, “they lie.” Take that as they’ll say one thing and do another. That’s why observing what they do instead of asking what they want gets you quicker to understanding their real needs.

“How do you make a roadmap in 4 days? Buy a ton of sticky notes, go away for a week with your team, and follow some variation of the process we outlined here to focus relentlessly on customers and how to make them successful.” Rian Van Der Merwe is Wildbit’s new Product Manager and he wasted no time in getting the team to decide their product vision and roadmap. This is what retreats are great for, especially with remote teams.

Price Club, not Fight Club! Pricing strategy is a huge part of many businesses, but rarely discussed in product and service design. Good, better and best pricing strategies seem popular, but can user’s really feedback on price?

I talked about this last issue. This article by Paul Boag offers possible solutions to increasing the effectiveness of your newsletter signup without being annoying with a popup. Context is everything.

Cool office design is COOL. I’ve worked at a variety of offices over the years, but they were nothing like this. Any environment that you’ll spend most of your time needs a lot of thought and should help you get work done, not hinder. I especially like the mix of private spaces and corners - open plan and clean desk policies be damned!